Malaysia Airlines MH370: Co-pilot was last to communicate from cockpit

The co-pilot of the missing Malaysia Airlines plane has been identified as the last person to communicate from the cockpit, apparently after the communications system was shut off.

Clarification that the voice was most likely that of First Officer Fariq Abdul Hamid came as Malaysian officials hit back at “irresponsible” suggestions that they had misled the public - and passenger’s relatives - over what happened to Flight 370.

As land, air and sea searches fanned out across two vast corridors reaching from Uzbekistan to Australia, Captain Zaharie Ahmad Shah and his co-pilot Fariq Abdul Hamid have become a primary focus of the investigation, with one of the key questions being who was in control of the aircraft when it veered off course about an hour into its flight to Beijing with 239 passengers and crew on board.

The cause of the plane’s unusual change of course and subsequent silent flight for up to eight hours turns on the crucial minutes around 1.19am, when Hamid gave his final nonchalant message: “All right, good night”.

Two minutes later - and 40 minutes after take-off - the plane disappeared from the screens of air traffic controllers. It has been missing for ten days since departing Kuala Lumpur for Beijing.

Adding to speculation that flight MH370 was hijacked, media reports in Malaysia said the Boeing 777 flew as low as 5,000 feet and used “terrain masking” to avoid radar detection for almost eight hours after it was apparently seized.

Using a manoeuvre typically deployed by combat aircraft, the plane dropped altitude to avoid commercial radars but would have burnt far more fuel flying in the denser lower air, according to Malaysia’s New Straits Times, a newspaper with close connections to the government.

The Malaysian authorities insisted the report was unconfirmed and it was not aware whether the plane was flying low.

Hamid, 27, was the oldest of four children from a well-to-do family in Kuala Lumpur. His father is a senior civil servant who is a devout attendee of the nearby Surau Al Mawaddah mosque.

Hamid had plans to marry his girlfriend, Nadira Ramli, 26, a pilot with the budget airline AirAsia and the daughter of a Malaysia Airlines pilot. The couple studied at the same pilot school and had known each for nine years.

He appears to have been heavily focused on his cars - a new BMW and a four-year-old Audi - and his high-flying job. Last week it emerged that in 2011 he invited two blonde South African tourists into the cockpit for a flight.

A neighbour of the Hamid family, a taxi driver, told The Telegraph: “I don’t think Fariq can hijack the plane. He loves cars so much just like I do... I didn’t see anything strange happening in his family, for example before the plane went missing,”

Authorities in Malaysia still believe the communications system was disabled prior to Hamid’s final message but appeared to throw their finding into doubt on Monday when they confirmed that the system could have been disabled at any time between its last regular signal at 1.07am and 1.37am, when it failed to emit its next scheduled update.

Malaysia has focussed its search for the plane on two corridors spanning up to 30 million of square miles, including huge swathes of the Indian Ocean. It has appealed for help from 26 countries in the region to provide radar information and details of any air, sea or land surveillance. The aircraft’s final hourly satellite ping was received at 8.11am and it had enough fuel to fly for a further 30 minutes, according to Malaysia Airlines.

“We don’t know when the ACARS [Aircraft Communications Addressing and Reporting System] system was switched off,” said Ahmad Jauhari Yahya, the head of Malaysia Airlines. “The investigation is looking at all possibilities.”

But the admission seemed to refute the claim on Sunday by Hishammuddin Hussein, the defence minister, who had said the system was disabled at 1.07am.

Asked to clarify, Mr Hussein said: “What I said yesterday was based on fact, corroborated and verified.”

An aviation expert, David Learmount, said that the disabling of the communications system appeared deliberate, though but he was “not sure we will ever know for sure”.

Malaysian police are investigating all passengers and crew aboard the flight and have twice interviewed the families of the pilot, Captain Zaharie Shah, 53, and Hamid.

Police seized a three-screen flight simulator from Zaharie’s home and reassembled it at their headquarters in Kuala Lumpur but have not disclosed whether it revealed any clues.

The 53-year-old was a veteran pilot and father of three who has been described by a former fellow pilot as “always smiling and very cheerful”.

He was known to support Anwar Ibrahim, Malaysia’s opposition leader, but his YouTube postings reveal other more mundane interests such as how to fix an ice-maker.

Mr Anwar denied any strong link to Zaharie, telling the South China Morning Post that he had only seen the pilot at party meetings. He added that Chinese complaints about the handling of the search were “absolutely justified”.

A source told The Telegraph on Monday that initial checks by Western intelligence agencies had so far found nothing suspicious in the backgrounds of those aboard.

Mr Hussein confirmed that no terrorist groups had claimed responsibility for the plane’s disappearance.

“The fact there are no distress signals, there are no ransom notes, there are no parties claiming responsibility - there is still hope,” he said.

Asked about the possibility of “pilot suicide”, he said: “Yes, we are looking at it.”

Authorities have found no evidence that mobile telephones belonging to passengers were used or were still functioning after the plane took off.